The
the lines of tall shade trees have been covering the sidewalk and
street on my block with a beautiful yellow carpet of seed pouches.
Colorful, I'm thinking, but in curious way kind of sad too. These trees
go on dropping their pollen, meant to germinate and implant offspring.
The pollen falls on the impenetrable concrete of sidewalks and asphalt
streets. Day after day they continue to flower down pollen as if
fertile earth lay below.

Just
as the trees are not capable of understanding that their energy and
effort is unproductive, just so are Progressives incapable of
understanding the uselessness of trying to implant human growth in a
political economy based on, and controlled by and for, unyielding
sterile private capital accumulation.

Just as that unyieldingly
hard, life-ignoring concrete was originally made from breathing earth
and sand made rigid by cement, just so, were the impenetrable minds of
hedge-fund managers, investment bankers, mega-dimension investors,
their purchased politicians and their hired and beholden commercial
conglomerate media personnel were once wonderful ordinary, normal
children before being captivated, captured and lobotomized by
expensively dressed desperate, insecure, greedy and mentally challenged
conquerors. (A hundred years ago, America's own Thorstein Veblen saw the
modern business leader as essentially a latter-day predatory
warrior-transformed, armed, and clothed in a fashion that enables him
to dominate modern society.)

If
trees had eyes they could look down on their dying seedlings.
Progressives "have eyes but cannot see' Afghanis, Iraqis, Somali,
Yemeni physically dying, as uncountable as leaves on trees, cannot see
the mentally dying here, crushed by money worries and antisocial
depression, the now billions dying spiritually for the commodification,
commercialization and loss of life's naturalness - all promoted by the
human sacrifice and materialism embedded in the capitalist mode of
production for profit, not use.

But Progressives can see clearly
the wealth created by Americans working under management of America's
already wealthy. They can hear the admiration and praise from from
cooperative capitalist elite in nearly every nation on Earth.

Just as we
can have a modicum of hope for the pollen where the earth appears
between cracks and buckling in the concrete, progressives point to
social reforms within the normally unrelentingly cruel wage labor
system. Reforms that grant human beings some bare necessities, and
force a recognition beyond that of their usefulness as hired labor.

However,
just as those cracks and buckles in the street and sidewalk are
constantly worked on to close up and seal, capitalist governance seeks
to roll back Social Security, Unemployment Benefits, Set Wage Minimums.

The
reforms were necessary to concede for the threat of revolution during
the Great (capitalist) Depression. A corresponding example is power
elite granting the construction of parks and nature reserves to protect
themselves from revolt and punishment by powerful Mother Nature, which
provides the needed fresh air to breathe for the owners of society as
well as those that labor for them.

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This
begrudging and self protecting relenting to give their natural
resources a chance to survive, gave the insane planetary plunderers a
literal "breather' before going on to cement over more than ever before
with cataclysmic foreshadowing. Just so, the social reforms of the
thirties saved American capitalism to enable it to create inexpressible
horror for humanity.

On to the super tremendous profits from
WWII, that raised the U.S. capitalist leadership high above those of
all the other capitalist economies, wrecked by the mother of all
profitable wars with a Nazi Germany built up to be the world dominant
military power of the day by U.S. financiers and the industrial and
investment banks led by Henry Ford, Dupont, Rockefeller and the cream
of the scions of American business families.

If the sidewalk
trees could think, they might rationalize that the natural release of
pollen is not controllable and is necessary for the trees' health.
Progressives don't have such an excuse for continuing with their
impossible task, but cannot imagine doing otherwise, being at root base
Capitalism's rearguard. Progressives pose as Leftists intellectuals
championing a capitalism progressively less homicidal as a model for
the increasingly politically aware citizenry to work toward.

Progressives
decry imperialism's past crimes as well intentioned mistakes. Mistakes
like approving Japan's claim to Korea; like investing heavily in
Hitler; like bringing the French colonial armed forces back in to
Vietnam; like overthrowing a few dozen governments seeking independence
from U.S. corporate exploitation; like invading too many countries at
the same time; like giving mogul bankers most of the nation's current
wealth.

Progressives condemn these mistakes, the present wars,
and the war games preparing for future wars, but shy away from
revolutionary socialism and associating with the communists who have
consistently led a real fight against imperialist wars.

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There
is not a world renown philosopher, writer, poet, composer, artist,
clergyman, scientist or inventor, who has had a good word for
capitalism. And to find those who have been dedicated to condemning it,
one need not look to the likes of Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., or Peoples Historian Howard Zinn. No, just quote one
of a number of capitalism's most famous luminaries in their candid
moments:

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most
wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest
good of everyone." John Maynard Keynes - the economist credited solving the dilemma of how to keep capitalism going when the stimulus of WW II was gone also predicted:

"When
the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance,
there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to
rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have
hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of
the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the
highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the
money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -- as
distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and
realities of life -- will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat
disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological
propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in
mental disease" ...

Which
sounds like something Che Guevara said, but then Keynes astounds
us with a mysterious justification for the continuance of what he has
just described as criminal insanity:

But beware! The time for
all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend
to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for
foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must
be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of
the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

So,
as if Einstein, Gandhi, MLKjr and Zinn were as irrelevant as corporate
controlled U.S. media has made them, Progressives (Progressive
Capitalists), go on trying to reform a system of exploitation of the
many by the few. (Which reminds of trees in the middle of a city
pollinating onto concrete.)

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles (more...)